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sco copyrights

From: Bill Campbell <bill@celestial.com>
Subject: Re: SCO gets $50 million investment
Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 17:08:13 GMT
References: <Xns9416F36203CF1billbftld@130.133.1.4>
<EaLjb.486060$2x.201274@rwcrnsc52.ops.asp.att.net>
<bmosu8$23q$3@pcls4.std.com> 

On Fri, Oct 17, 2003, tony@aplawrence.com wrote:
>Joe Dunning <joe@blahblah.invalid> wrote:
>
>>Now wy would SCO have to pay "licensing costs"? Surely they RECEIVE 
>>licensing fees? Or are they thinking about what SCO will have to pay to 
>>IBM and others for copyright and patent infringement? 
>
>Now you are being clueless.  Do you think SCO develops everything 
>in house?  Try typing "copyrights" at any old SCO box you see 
>lying around.

SCO never was a major Unix developer, but more of an integrator of other
people's packages into boring, but commercially stable systems.  They
probably did more original work than Microsoft (name one thing M$ wrote
from scratch that was successful -- Bob?).  Xenix was originally a
Microsoft port.  SCO Unix was quite a bit behind various other Unix
flavours, and didn't even have long file names or symbolic links until
3.2v4 came out in 1992 (it did have some ``interesting'' security features
that could render a system unusable even by root :-).

SCO has certainly worked on some interesting projects such as the Universal
Driver Interface (hi Robert if you're listening), and participated in some
industry standards work including the one that produced iBCS which they're
now suing people for using.

SCO paid royalties to Microsoft for many years for things relating to
Xenix, and SCO's development system was largely built around Microsoft C
compilers until SCO acquired the New Jersey departments that had at one
time been with Bell Labs.  I may be mistaken, but I think most of the
really interesting Development System work was done by the group SCO bought
in Toronto.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill@Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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